If I try hard enough, I can understand why we had to have fire drills in
elementary school. While it was probably obvious to most of us that when the
fire alarm went off, we were supposed to leave the building, I can maybe see
that there could have been a few kids who needed the extra rehearsal that fire
drills provided. So, even though we had to go outside into the cold without any
jackets on whenever the alarm went off, I guess that, somewhere, this practice
has probably saved a couple of lives. But here’s the thing: In my residence
hall, we still have these fire drills. Apparently, there are people living here
who haven’t quite grasped the concept that leaving a building that is on
fire might not be that bad of an idea. Or maybe they just haven’t equated
the loud, blaring alarm sound to the possibility of fire. Or maybe there are
people here who don’t know how to exit a building.

It’s a good thing we have these drills, though, because otherwise everyone
would be saying, “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me to go out a door when
there’s a fire? And that a ‘fire alarm’ means that there’s probably one
of these fires somewhere in the building? Christ, let me get a pen to jot this
all down. Are you sure we can’t have some kind of drill for this? This is so
complicated. What were we supposed to do when there’s a fire again?” Hell,
even somebody like that would know the procedure after twelve years of fire
drills throughout grade school.

Now that I think of it, if there ever is a fire, a lot of people would assume
that the alarm is just related to another drill, and they’d all stay inside
and get burned up. So, in the end, fire drills do serve a purpose--they kill
innocent people.

It cost a lot of money to eat at the cafeteria, and the food isn’t that
good, yet somehow they have the nerve to serve us french fries that are shaped
into little happy faces. I think this is the cafeteria’s way of saying,
“Fuck you.”

1-29-01

My zodiac sign is Cancer, which probably means that I’m nature-orientated
or creative or open-minded or something like that. Sometimes I like to read my
horoscope in MSU’s The State News, because not only do they tell you how your
day is going to be, they also proceed to rank the difficulty of your day on a
scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the easiest). According to their assessment of my
day:

“Today is a 5 -- The people at the top of the food chain will be even
more aggressive than usual. You find that rather annoying. Why should you be put
out because somebody else didn’t manage their time properly? Probably because
that’s your job.”

What the hell does that even mean? According to them, my job is to tidy up
after the people at the top of the food chain. My horoscope today is so rude.
“Why should you be put out? Uh, hello. Probably because that’s your job,
dumbass.” I don't even work today.

The problem is that horoscopes are so vague that they can be interpreted in a
thousand different ways. I’ve never seen a horoscope that’s like, “Today,
you will wear a blue sweater and somebody will comment to you, ‘Hey didn’t I
use to play soccer with you in the 4th grade?’ Later, after eating at Burger
King, you will find a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Don’t pick it up, as it is
infested with the herpes virus.” I’m going to make up a horoscope for
everybody reading this to demonstrate how arbitrary the process is:

“Because of your wise nature, you prefer to be around the company of
others. But today, be wary of somebody who might aspire to question your sense
of self. Also, you will read a horoscope today. And why should you be put out
because of somebody else’s lack of organization? Probably because that’s
your job, fool.”

1-24-01

Whatever provoking anecdote I was going to offer today has been accidentally
replaced in my memory by the fact that the density of Quartz is 2.65 g/cm^3.
Science class is so sweet. You know, I think I’ve had the exact same lab where
I was supposed to identify a bunch of different minerals using several
scientific experiments about every year since the 6th grade, and I still don’t
know how the hell to do it. This is going to catch up with me in a few years
when some guy holds up a gun to my head, hands me a beaker of water for the
water-displacement test, a penny, a nail and a file for the scratch test and a
mystery mineral, and then asks me to tell him what it is. Thankfully, if this
doesn’t happen, it won’t ever really matter that I can’t tell the
difference between a piece of Olivine and a chunk of goddamned Pyrite.

I recently found out that an anagram for my name is “a racial jerk,”
which I guess means that I’m probably really racist. I apologize for this, but
you can’t argue with anagrams. What’s an anagram
for your name?

1-21-01

These days, shows targeted towards kids don’t make any damned sense to me.
This isn’t because I’m 18, this is because today’s kids like to watch
really weird crap. Over this past winter break, I sometimes went to sleep at a
variety of unorthodox times, such as 11am, or noon. Because of this, I had the
opportunity to see what kind of stuff the TV networks had for kids these days,
and I found out that all of it was confusing, nonsensical jargon. Back in my
day, on Saturday mornings we had Captain Planet, X-men and Cro, the
historically-accurate cartoon about a smart Cro-Magnon kid who was raised by
stupid, stupid Neanderthals. Today, however, there’s all these scary animals
who don’t resemble any actual, existing animals, and they say all this weird
stuff, and I don’t even get any of the jokes. Then I turned to Nickelodeon,
which used to have that show called “You Can’t Say That on Television,”
which, if I can remember correctly, was about a bunch of kids who lived in
lockers and told retarded jokes, and about a really nasty cafeteria attendant
who made me want to throw up. It appears that, these days, Nickelodeon is more
like a cult, and they have all these messed-up cartoons who keep saying all
these strange words to the kids, like “Dooniz,” and “Freeble.”
Apparently, this is the same thing with the Disney Channel. In between Aaron
Carter and Lil Bow Wow videos, they talk about computers and the internet
destroying any semblance of a normalcy in the world, and they instruct kids to
say the word “Zoog” over and over. I think that today’s kids are much
cooler and smarter than any of us could ever hope to be.

Also of note is that the light-up shoe fad is back amongst the youngsters,
and whenever they take a step, a tiny red light blinks on. Those things are so
sweet. I’d probably buy a pair if I wore a size two.

1-18-01

Every couple of months, there’s a page included in my planner that asks me
several life-important questions, such as “Which of your academic and personal
goals for the semester have you met?” and “What progress are you making?”
These enquiries are followed by several thoughtful lines of blank space, which
allow me to respond to them, and really get my damned life together. I’d have
to say that without these pages in my planner, I would be so lost. Whenever I
come across one of them, I say to myself, “What changes do I need to
make in order to meet my goals for this semester? Christ, I never even thought
about that before. Thank you, planner.”

1-14-01

For those of you who don’t know, Cap 10 is a sparkling mineral water that
tastes like how water would taste if water tasted like crap. The first time I
had it, I was repulsed, and I wondered why people would buy something like that.
For some reason, however, I began to put just a little bit of the sparkling
water into a lot of various juices that I drank. Even though this practice made
those juices taste worse than they normally did, I gradually increased the
percentage of Cap 10 until it was at about the 50% level. A few short months
later, I was chugging down raw bottles of Cap 10 left and right, and these days
I have a full bottle near my bed at all times. According to its Nutrition Facts,
all there is in Cap 10 is a little bit of sodium and some calcium, but I think
they forgot to mention all the cocaine they include in the drink.

Thank God for Martin Luther King. If there were 364 people just like him,
I’d never have to go to class. Also, as an added bonus, there wouldn’t be
any hatred or prejudice.

1-11-01

Is it some sort of rule that every teen sitcom must have at least one episode
where one of the characters gets a job, usually at the mall, where they are
required to dress up as some sort of embarrassing fast-food mascot? Although
this plot device is over-used, I’ll admit that it can certainly lead to many
hilarious situations. For example, suppose this person gets stuck in the costume
on the night of the big autumn school dance and has to attend wearing the giant
chicken outfit. After the ensuing comedy, the moral would be that it doesn’t
matter how you look so much as what kind of person you are. Or, suppose this
person works at Captain Blackbeard’s Fish ‘n’ Dip and has to dress up as a
pirate. Then, when all his/her friends stop by the restaurant to get some food,
the character has to put on an impromptu funny accent so that they can’t tell
who it is, and so nobody knows that this character has a job as a ridiculous
fast-food pirate.

Speaking of funnels, does anybody remember those big yellow funnels where if
you put a coin it, you could delight in watching it roll around and around until
it finally fell through to the bottom? I don’t know if they still have them,
but I remember seeing them at a lot of weird museums. They were definitely worth
the penny it cost to use them because you could have these crazy races, or make
two pennies roll in opposing directions. If you’re really cheap and don’t
want to waste the penny, the best part was that you could grab them before they
fell into the hole in the center. Those things are easily the most entertainment
a penny can by. My emotions on this are best summarized by this
clipart picture.

1-8-01

OK, I realize that whinny, often overly-sarcastic errant complaints make up
about 98% of eKarjala, but today I have something legit to talk about: buying
textbooks. Student bookstores, with a completely straight face, will tell you
that the used science textbook you need to get is worth $80, which is a crazy
price for a poorly-written parade of information you couldn’t care less about.
But you need to buy the book for the class regardless, and have no choice but to
pay their price, even though everybody knows that the only good thing about
textbooks is that sometimes they include random comic strips. It’s always a
joy to be studying for a test and stumble upon an out-of-place Calvin &
Hobbes cartoon. After awhile, I stop studying completely and begin to
frantically flip through every page looking for another Marmaduke strip, leading
to a poor grade on that exam. I have never gotten above a D in a class where the
textbook has comic strips.

Anyway, you buy the science textbook and are now broke. Flash-forward four
months later. The semester is over and you want to sell the book back to them,
as per the system those stores have established. But now they say, “You want
to sell us this piece of crap? Here’s 78 cents. Go buy yourself a Snickers.”
My current plan is to keep all of my textbooks and never sell them back to the
stores, because then they won’t be able to make another $80 off of it. Also,
this affords me the opportunity to write funny captions on all of the pictures.

Speaking of pictures, I recently got editing software for my camcorder which
allows me to put pictures and movies on my computer. With that said: